SoK: The Constant Time Model

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 11 Jun 2026] SoK: The Constant Time Model Billy Bob Brumley Constant time programming patterns is the primary defense against timing attacks on cryptographic implementations, yet what "constant time" means varies across academia and industry. This work systematizes constant time models and their evolution, identifies a recurring gap between what models protect and what specifications assume, and distills an offensive methodology for discovering timing vulnerabilities that originate outside the cryptographic primitive boundary. Applying this methodology, we locate a specification-level vulnerability related to private key loading, and confirm the leak in both OpenSSL and BoringSSL. Counterintuitively, BoringSSL's per-observation signal is several orders of magnitude stronger than OpenSSL's, despite an explicitly stricter threat model. Comments: WOOT 2026 Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2606.13000 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2606.13000v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.13000 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Billy Bob Brumley [view email] [v1] Thu, 11 Jun 2026 07:38:02 UTC (3,478 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)